The Most Extreme Way to Watch the Eclipse? Chase It in a Jet The total solar eclipse on Monday, August 21 is shaping up to be an Earth-shaking event, if the crowds getting into position five days early are any indication. But while carloads of chasers are queuing up to see the totality, some are skipping …
Yellowstone Supervolcano Could Power Electric Cars of the Future This story originally appeared on Newsweek and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Electric cars and smartphones of the future could be powered by supervolcanoes like Yellowstone after scientists discovered that ancient deposits within them contain huge reservoirs of lithium—a chemical element used to make lithium-ore batteries, supplies of which …
The Robots Will Be Soft and Cuddly and Heal Their Own Wounds Poke a hole in a human and something remarkable happens. First of all, you go to jail. But meanwhile, the wound heals itself, filling in the missing tissue and protecting itself from infection. Poke a hole in a robot, however, and prepare for a …
What a Border Collie Taught a Linguist About Language Tansy was not into sports. The little border collie, a rescue, didn’t care for agility trials or flyball. But her adopted family—with two other border collies already in the house—did them all the time. Border collies are working dogs, the elite athletes of the canine universe. They …
The Best Way to Test Students? Make Them Explain It On Video As a physics professor, I have two jobs. The first, obviously, is to help students understand physics. That makes me something of a coach. But I want to talk about my second job: evaluating what students understand about physics. You might call this grading …
How Solar Eclipses Illuminate the Marvel of Science On Monday, August 21, 2017, the world will go under, or so it might well feel like if you position yourself along a 70-mile-wide swath of the US from South Carolina to Oregon. From here you can witness the moon move in front of the sun in the …
James Damore’s Google Memo Gets Science All Wrong In early August, a Google engineer named James Damore posted a document titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” to an internal online discussion group. His memo was a calm attempt to point out all the ways Google has gone wrong in making gender representation among its employees a corporate …
Quantum Internet Is 13 Years Away. Wait, What’s Quantum Internet? A year ago this week, Chinese physicists launched the world’s first quantumsatellite. Unlike the dishes that deliver your Howard Stern and cricket tournaments, this 1,400-pound behemoth doesn’t beam radio waves. Instead, the physicists designed it to send and receive bits of information encoded in delicate photons …
The Plan to Put a 3-D Printer With Robot Arms Into Orbit Space is indifferent to your suffering. It doesn’t care that it’ll freeze you to death unless you’re wearing a fancy suit, or that even before freezing you’ll suffocate in its vacuum. And it certainly doesn’t care how difficult it is for humans to get …
How to View the Solar Eclipse Without Glasses You’ve surely heard by now that the moon will pass between Earth and the sun on August 21, creating a total solar eclipse that will cast a shadow over much of the US. Jimmy Carter was president the last time this happened, so you definitely don’t want to …